Gameplay downgraded?

1:56

If that doesn't work I don't know what will.

Thanks, that's good to hear. I expected offline to be soon anyway, since Uber commented in that direction. It's just something i need to fully enjoy the game and it took so long.
And really, soon™ is a very variable term in the games industry...

Additional to exterminans visual guide, mind that server work with fps=gamespeed.

Usually your PC e.g. assumes a unit moves 1m/s between two server frames at normal speed. So it gets the units position+movement direction, moves it at 1m/s, and then checks with the next server frame.

The Client didn't consider that the server can get slower, though. In this case your game would still move a unit 1m/s in the direction, while the server might have the unit moving at 0.8m/s. The next server frame would then tell your client the unit didn't move that far, and it would jump back ingame.

That's the jittering. It's basically just false interpolation, which is corrected by adding the time dilation to clients.

All this slow client stuff is to hide the slowdown if things go bad. So if you're having a huge game which normally goes choppy with lots of units, now looks smooth. There is no set slowdown whatsoever, the slowdown that causes this was always going to be there with or without this smoothning code. You just notice the slowdown slightly less
I don't know why everybody is making such a fuss about this, this piece of code is awesome!! It makes the game way more smooth visually while nothing else changes

and you need to stop the drama ...

yeah the exact same thing we had in FA p2p version thank you very much.

Yes only now it'll only be if the server fails. If you have a really good server then this issue of slow down disappears.

...You just got done pointing out that you didn't know about interp / prediction. And now someone makes a diagram explaining interp, how it's only the client-side smoothing of the simulation, how it can now account for variable sim framerate to show you smooth transitions regardless of sim speed, and why it has no effect on the sim speed itself whatsoever...
and apparently you now fully understand it and are deriding exterminans for making it.

wat.

So you would have preferred FA not to have time dilation, and instead be a choppy, unplayable experience when it lagged?

You are suggesting that Uber should code the engine assuming it would never lag. That would not only be naive but also irresponsible of them, especially given as you pointed out that it is aiming to be an engine/platform, and not just a standalone game. People will always be pushing the game to it's limits; buying more/better servers is NOT a solution, it just hides the problem for a bit. Nor is unit caps, because unless you set the unit cap low enough so that the minimum spec computer can run that many units, some people are still going to experience lag (and that unit cap would be tiny). The unit cap is also dependent on many factors which can't all be calculated in advance:

• Type of unit - some are more expensive to simulate than others
• Size/complexity of map
• What the units are doing - moving takes more resources than being still, and it changes depending on what unit and where they are going/what they are doing
• Number of players
• and many more

So dynamic unit caps (which is a weird concept in any case) won't work either, because it can't actually work out what number is acceptable.

You are not only suggesting that uber take up these bad practices, but you are essentially saying to people with lower-spec computers that want to run the server locally in future "tough luck, deal with a choppy game" instead of doing something that a least makes it playable for them (slow is playable, choppy is not). Furthermore, this insistence that the change means uber won't continue optimization is unfounded and ... strange. Especially when a dev came out and said exactly this on page 4:

Well said.
And to top it all off, as I said before, this has no negative effect on performance. It's not a compromise, it's only an improvement.

To be exact, the 'time dilation' is actually just fixing a bug, namely the client incorrectly interpolating.

There's nothing you can do about the server lagging due to too much stuff happening in the game. This piece of code doesn't change that.

I preffer to get all information, even if I need to wait a lot of time... this is why I like FA... but the problem is that I have a s*** internet(1mb/s + unexpected Youtube and NetFlix) that I can't play both FAF or PA

I much prefer time dilation to a slideshow.

Reading this thread seems to have made time slow down.

One simple reason: If our sim starts to slow down, we want it to be graceful about it. Not come to a crashing screeching halt or jerk from 10FPS to 1FPS constantly, which is totally unplayable.

Our engine architecture is _designed_ to let you push the engine as hard as you want. It should do that gracefully, don't you think?

And yes, lots of people report lots of bugs. And many bugs are completely unable to be repro'd by anyone else (which make them hard to fix, btw), are disagreements with a design choice, or simply are so minor that we haven't gotten to them yet. Hopefully we'll get to the first and the last ones as soon as possible. The middle ones, well.. people can mod their ideal design choices, and will be able to get much more exposure in the future.

A little perspective when posting.. always a good idea. We have offloaded NOTHING to the client. That is not what time dilation is about. It's looking the running average of sim tick performance and slowing down the expected sim rate so it's smooth until we can recover the sim performance. The lag is there whether we enable the dilation or not. But dilation makes it actually playable.

I'd also like to make this abundantly clear for anyone who really hasn't been paying attention:

The time dilation only comes into effect when the server is slowed down. It is NOT DEPENDENT in ANY WAY on your machine.

"If you don't build a thousand dox to defend your planet against an unlikely invasion, you might not have time dilation"

Precisely. It has almost nothing to do with the client, other than the client getting marginally less data, because the server thread is being told by the sim thread "Hey, uhm.. I'm ticking less often because apparently there is CRAZY AMOUNTS OF FIGHTS GOING ON." and the client in turn says "Sweet! I can render this slower sim at crazy frame rates!"

I'd love it if you could one day write up an article explaining how your server architecture works, it's scalability, etc. Obviously I wouldn't expect you to give away the actual methods of implementing it (i.e. how it's done), but WHAT is being done by the servers to handle a game of this size, that I would love to know. Using the power of the cloud is definitely the future for gaming and I'd love to know more of the technical stuff thats going on behind the scenes. If you threw more and more servers at one single game, does the performance increase, or does it not work like that?